If nothing else, 'T3' is blessedly unpretentious

Updated 10:00 pm, Tuesday, July 1, 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger's old, obsolete Terminator is back in black. Leather, that is, as well as his trademark dark glasses and monosyllabic punchlines.

In "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," the battle-scarred Schwarzenegger, once Hollywood's favorite special effect, has against all odds transformed into an old-fashioned underdog of imposing flesh, brute force and relentless drive holding his own in the face of the digital paintbox of modern effects.

The film opens like a remake of "T2": John Connor (now a scruffy, haggard Nick Stahl) is once again the target of an assassin from the future and another Terminator (Schwarzenegger) is sent back to protect him.

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This time, however, a second, more reluctant target (Claire Danes) gets the paternal bodyguard's services as well.

While a voracious computer virus devours the Internet and shuts down the communications network, the once and future heroes of the human resistance race the clock to stop the military from activating the thinking super-program SkyNet on the communications infrastructure and unleashing a fate worse than "The Matrix."

The new Terminator T-X (Kristanna Loken) looks more like she's stepped out of "Blue Lagoon" than the machine age when she first strides down the street, but this year's model has the liquid malleability of the previous film's T-1000 poured over a veritable Swiss Army knife: Inspector Gadget as a Victoria's Secret mannequin.

The supposedly emotionless killing machines somehow manage more dramatic interest than the human cast, as the Terminator turns into a tough-love father figure and T-X sneaks in looks of smirking satisfaction during her reign of terror. Stahl can't seem to get worked up about much of anything and Danes spends most of the film looking lost, perplexed or just pissed off at the whole ordeal.

Director Jonathan Mostow delivers an impressive display of property damage in his first signature scene, a battering chase with a small platoon of riderless cars and a barreling construction crane that practically levels a neighborhood, and continues in the same vein throughout the film.

But where "Terminator" creator James Cameron transformed previous man-versus-machine duels into show-stopping spectacle, Mostow favors momentum. He powers through his set pieces with such speed that you rarely notice (or just don't care) when the plot and the characters fail to connect. (It makes you wonder if the script was whittled down from a Cameron-size epic to a lean, swiftly paced doomsday roller coaster when Cameron passed on the project.)

It may lack the mano-a-machino grit and grungy gut-punch of the original down-and-dirty "Terminator" and the eye-popping effects spectacle and epic action movie ambition of "T2: Judgment Day," but in a summer of comic book super-operas dense with psychological torment and sprawling well over two hours, the unpretentious efficiency of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" is refreshing.